GoDaddy
tweeted
during the outage that it was aware of the "trouble" it was having and that it was working on the issue.

At one point, it moved its domain name service (DNS) to Verisign, one of its competitors,
Wired reported.

Some of its DNS servers were reportedly up again at 4 pm ET, and GoDaddy tweeted that it was still working on ongoing issues.

On Tuesday,
GoDaddy announced that its investigation into the outage had been completed, and that it was caused by a series of internal network events that corrupted its
router data tables.

Could Be Avoided

If that's what happened, it represents a major security oversight.

"It all comes down to how they are building and maintaining route tables, but realistically an enterprise-class network should be fortified against such issues," Frank Artes, a research director at
NSS Labs, told TechNewsWorld.

"Any time a network suffers a cascading failure that doesn't have a stop-gap, it is indicative of misconfiguration and [inadequate] administration practices," Artes said. Further, "change control should have caught any new configuration whether it be new hardware installs, new routes established, or even the changing of ... protocol configurations."

On the other hand, such a mishap "could happen to anyone and is normally more often the negative end result of cost cutting and overtaxing human resources than it is the skill of the engineers," Artes stated.

"Viruses eating the silicon chips is not possible, but other than that, most anything that can be done with data, including data corruption, is possible," Randy Abrams, also a research director at NSS Labs, told TechNewsWorld.

DDoS Attacks, Anyone?

However, corruption of routing tables "is more the means of a denial of service attack," NSS Labs' Artes pointed out. It's not likely to be the work of hackers because "by the very nature of the corruption, you would stand the great risk, and very high probability, of severing your own command-and-control channels used to harvest information ... from internal servers."

"The amount of bandwidth and the number of servers [GoDaddy] runs is so vast that it literally requires millions of computers to orchestrate such a focused and targeted attack," Stella continued. "That would mean a very large botnet, certainly not something simply anyone can organize."

Who You Gonna Believe?

The scale of the attack required is one of the issues that casts doubts on AnonymousOwn3r's claim.

Another is the fact that Anonymous has remained cool to news of the attack. Another of the hacker collective's Twitter accounts, often used to post news of its attacks,
AnonymousIRC, has carried nothing about the GoDaddy outage.

Both Network Box's Stella and NSS Labs' Artes cited Anonymous'
claims about stealing Apple device IDs from FBI special agent Christopher Stangl's laptop, which have been proven untrue, as a reason for doubting AnonymousOwn3r's announcement.

"Between GoDaddy's sexist advertising campaigns and former support for
SOPA legislation, a significant portion of the global population would take great delight in claiming to cause them problems," NSS Labs' Abrams said.